


Anatomy Lesson

by sherrold



Category: Chaim Potok - My Name Is Asher Lev
Genre: Art, Books, Drawing, Gen, Jewish Character, Judaism, Yuletide 2008, orthodox jewish character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-17
Updated: 2008-12-17
Packaged: 2017-10-03 05:41:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sherrold/pseuds/sherrold
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Day in the life of a young artist</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anatomy Lesson

**Author's Note:**

> Written for: Denzil in the Yuletide 2008 Challenge  
> CCH and B did awesome beta help, and MamaDeb was my Orthodox goto.

It had been a chilly spring. My father's last trip home had left our apartment bitter and raw as well; even our fights had been cold. And then my mother offered me a bleak choice between two things I didn't want: go to Vienna with her, or stay behind with my Uncle Yitzchok's family. She never said it as baldly as this, but the time was coming when I would have to give her up, or give up Jacob. I didn't know which was worse.

Art was my safe place. Jacob Kahn's studio was not safe, but it was better; it was the one place in my world where I was not crazy for caring about art. And for that, two or three times a week, I willingly caught the subway across town, and tried to be ready for each new challenge.

One Sunday soon after my father went back to Vienna, Jacob stood over my shoulder as I drew scenes from my Torah class: my teacher, the backs and shoulders of the boys who sit in front of me. I knew I had made the walls higher and darker than they were and the shadows deeper, and decided I was being too obvious. Without waiting for his comments, I started a new page, trying a lighter touch on the charcoal to form my teacher's short beard and dark eyes.

Jacob still stared over my shoulder, now frowning slightly. I stopped and evaluated; the balance was off a little, I thought, and started yet another page, trying to visualize my teacher clearly. He was small and round and his payos had bits of gray that caught the eye when he moved. I attempted to remember his eyes in my mind. All I could see was his glare when he thought I wasn't paying attention, but the glare didn't go with the face I had drawn. I started a new page.

"Stop."

I put down my charcoal and waited, still staring at the drawing, trying to see what was bothering him. The longer I looked, the more flaws I saw - the composition, the errors in memory (not that Jacob knew the room where I took Torah to know that I had moved the window too near the blackboard).

He moved closer and traced the shoulders of my classmates and my teacher; unusually, he let the blue paint on his fingers smear into the charcoal.

"Curves," he murmured.

"Curves," I repeated quietly, without asking for more information. I belonged to a tradition that frequently taught through obscurity. I looked again at the most recent drawing. There were curves to be seen -- in my teacher's payos, in each student's skullcap -- but not many. It was mostly hard lines of wall and desk and window. So, not enough curves?

Jacob stepped away and started rummaging through my discarded drawings, and then my paintings from the last few weeks, tracing over the figures as he usually did, his fingers ghosting just above the lines on the page.

I could stand it no longer. "Jacob Kahn, what do you see?"

He ignored me and continued to work backwards in time, reaching the last Sunday before my father came back from Vienna. He grabbed a drawing from that sitting and slapped it onto the easel, pulling my current drawing over so they sat uneasily side-by-side.

Seeing the drawing of the nude woman sitting next to my Torah teacher on the easel made me swallow uncomfortably. He grabbed another recent drawing, one of three Ladover men walking close together on the sidewalk, bent in to better hear each other's voices against the street noise, and placed it over my teacher on the easel. He pointed to their hips, hidden of course in their black coats and baggy trousers, and their shoulders, and elbows, and then pointed to the hips and shoulders of the nude, and finally, I saw.

Somehow, although I was painting men, underneath their clothing, I was visualizing women's bodies. I flushed hotly and lowered my head, rubbing my nose like a little boy. I had given my Torah teacher a woman's hips. "They were right! Drawing nudes is from the Other Side," I muttered.

"No, no, it's nothing. You just need to remind yourself of how men's and boy's bodies work." He rubbed his chin. "Hmm, only child," he said to himself. "Your father?"

I stared at him, aghast. "I have never seen him."

"Not even fresh from the shower?"

"Never without nightclothes and robe and slippers!"

He smiled at me. "You didn't lose the shape of men; you never had it to begin with."

He pulled out a couple of heavy books of art prints and started flipping through them, grumbling each time he found a nude or nearly nude Jesus on the Cross. He stopped and looked at one, Raphael, I think, and muttered, "someday, I think, but not today." Louder he continued, "The pressures of Crucifixion distort the body; they're not good physical models."

I just stared at him, mostly as a way of avoiding looking at any of my recent drawings, all of which now looked strangely warped to me.

He looked back. I must have looked sad, for he said, "Asher Lev, I will give you something to smile about." He stepped away, past the bank of windows, and said, "Perhaps you won't notice the glory of structure and form the way you did before--" as he started to take off his outer sweater, "--but we will follow the same framework." He unbuttoned his shirt. "Start with simple line drawings; no chiaroscuro."

I set new paper on my easel, very carefully, smoothing the edges down, then sharpened my pencils. By the time I came back, Jacob was sitting backwards on the chair in front of the windows, facing away from me, nothing to see but his long arms and pale wide back. I drew, quickly moving my pencil, trying not to care that my drawing was very bad. How to draw all that skin? It was soft, beginning to pull away from his body with age. The knobby bones of his spine enticed me to draw them as a trail down his back, but I chickened out halfway down, avoiding the shadow of his skin disappearing into his trousers. I turned the paper, my fingers damp with sweat, and tried again, and again, until he broke the pose.

"So," he said, standing and stretching. "That is harder than I remember. When I was young, we were all poor and we took turns posing for each other." He laughed quietly, and I could tell he was lost in his head. I stretched as well, trying to ignore him glancing through my work. "More, I think." He walked back to the windows and started to tug off his trousers, cursing idly as he realized his shoes were still on. He draped the chair with his shirt, oddly graceful, and sat back down this time turned towards me, sitting casually in the afternoon light.

I swallowed. I peeked and looked away and peeked again, and finally started low. Drew his feet, long and knobbed and strong, then his ankles. His calves and knees were all strings and bones, completely different from the models I had drawn. Finally thighs and hips, all in short glances, feeling like I was cheating somehow. I think I could tell he was circumcised, at least, which I knew of course, I must have known, for he had been a Torah Jew when he was younger, but honestly, I could barely see it, obscured behind his legs. His chest was somehow even larger than his back had been.

When he broke pose this time, I had done studies of his bones -- toes, ankles, knees, elbows-- but little else. I had drawn more of him before, when he'd had his back to me. And strangely, I hadn't drawn his face at all. Not at all.

He walked over to me, still naked, his broad shoulders the same width as they ever were, but now they had a color and a texture, and they were ornamented with soft pale flesh, stretching and easing as he walked, with nipples and ribs almost hiding behind thin white curls of hair below them. I glued my sight onto those shoulders to stop my eyes from dropping further.

"No, no," he said. "Not full studies for a painting - you're never going to paint me. Just quick lines to get the shapes into your fingers. Fast, think fast. Knees to noses, heads to toeses." He laughed again, very quietly. "One last pose, Asher."

This time he stood, his legs nearly together, his arms up and out forming a T shape. "Not a crucifix, Asher. The weights are very different. But the T, it is a strong shape."

I grabbed new paper and stared at him. This pose spoke of clarity, of a refusal to hide, almost a defiance. His arms and legs muscles were tight under loose flesh. And there was no hiding his sex; before it had been shadowed between his legs. This pose left no shadow.

His arms already had a slight quiver. I realized if I ever wanted a model to pose for me like this, I would need to provide some kind of support for them. I had a sudden flash of future models, future positions I wanted to ask for, but Jacob's actual flesh in front of me pulled me back to the now.

Maybe it was those quivers in his muscles, visibly straining to help me, but I was finally able to let my pencil fly, tracing each sinew and muscle in his arms and legs, each aging slump and convexity of chest and belly, the concavity of his hips, and yes, finally, his sex, hanging half covered, half shameless there in front of him, in front of me.

He broke with a little cry, again muttering that models work too, and this time he bent down to pull on his trousers before coming over to look.

"Yes." Just that simple syllable from him. "Yes," he said again, flipping from one page to the next and the next.

He turned and looked at me, those deep-set artist eyes mild on my face. "Another hard day, Asher Lev? Do you wonder anew what your Rebbe would think?"

I had the sudden thought that the Rebbe, and the mashpia too, were also naked under their dark clothes, and smiled. He smiled back, a little, and said, "The light is gone. Go home."

The subway ride home that night was surprisingly short, as my mind was racing. As I walked home, I looked at the Ladover men and boys around me, and pictured them naked. Not lasciviously, not comically, just as men with bodies, both frail and strong, beautiful and not. I wanted to draw them all, though I knew better than to ask any of them to pose for me.

That night, I dreamed of my father making breakfast, his robe flipping open and shut as he made toast. It was dark in the kitchen, heavily shadowed. When his robe opened, I couldn't tell what was under it. He was shouting, angry, his strong shoulders braced and square, nothing female about them. I knew he was yelling at my mother, and I drew them both, drawing very slowly, catching each rise and fall of his chest, each flap of the robe, the muscles in his outstretched arms growing tired, and I didn't know if it was my arms or his arms that were aching. I heard Jacob's voice saying, "the light is gone" as I woke up, and I had tears in my eyes.

I loved him, but I couldn't live with my father. I loved her, and my mother no longer wanted to live with me. I loved art but could I live it....

**Author's Note:**

> This is a very slightly changed version of the story in the Yuletide archive.


End file.
